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RL: What other sorts of things can happen?
Ken: Well, there are lots of treatments that are used in stones to enhance their value. One of the shopping channels uses the term ‘king ruby’. Within the trade there are treatments called glass infilling where, where there are fractures within the stone, a low grade piece of material that doesn’t look particularly nice, they’ll fill up all the craters, cracks, nooks and crannies with glass and then polish it all and it improves the appearance of the stone a thousand times. You then offer for sale a large ruby that could be very expensive.
For a very nice 1 carat size ruby you could pay two or three thousand pounds but you could find this enhanced stone turn up on an Internet shopping channel for £69.95 and the only difference is that the term ‘king ruby’ is used and you tend to be buying more glass than you are ruby. On the websites they will say that this may be the case and they may be colour enhanced. Colour enhancing can be anything from radiation treatments to simply coloured dies. For instance jade is coloured just by putting it in a green solution and colouring it. Many of the quartzes are coloured – vibrant blues, vibrant reds and it is just a die.

RL: What’s the problem with this?
Ken: The trouble with using coloured dies, is that it is no different from a jumper, a dress or anything else. Over a period of time the die fades, so what you buy is not what you get in fifty years time. If you buy a high quality natural stone with no enhancements what you see is what you get for the next thousand years. All enhancements will to some degree vary over a period of time and these are used as selling aids.
Some of the pieces we sell in our own business do have enhancements on them but if you tell them, it then gives the customer a choice of, do I wisely spend a hundred pounds or do I spend a thousand pounds? You may be happy with the lesserstone for a hundred pounds and so an enhanced stone has a place, providing the consumer knows what he is buying before he starts.  A lot of the enhancements that are done with gemstones aren’t stable. By that I mean because glass melts at a very low temperature, if you have a ring made smaller or larger and the repairer isn’t aware that the stone is enhanced – and very often he wouldn’t be because he isn’t a gemmologist – and the glass melts, all of a sudden your king ruby is a ruby with big holes in it where all the glass has melted out and it now looks quite a nasty looking thing, which is how it originally started life. These sort of treatments in high street shops need to be disclosed, or you have a visit from the Trading Standards Officers.           

RL: So the old adage that you get what you pay for is true here?
Ken: Yes, it’s very true. There is a term you see sometimes, I’ve only personally seen it on shopping channels and newspaper adverts, ‘mystic topaz’. Well topaz in its natural state comes in many different colours and one of them is colourless but because of the chemical makeup of the crystal structure of topaz, it doesn’t sparkle, it doesn’t look very pleasant. So to use a material that is very low value and turn it into something that is pretty they have managed to create something that is called ‘mystic topaz’ and that is basically a coating on the back of the stone, similar to that which is the reflective surface put on sunglasses, and the colours that you see from the front is the sheen from the back of the stone, that is called vapour disposition, but if you put it in caustic solutions which are quite often used when altering rings, suddenly the coating has disappeared because someone hasn’t realised that the stone is coated. Coated stones are particularly short lived because they are affected by so many things.  

RL: There just seems so much to know in this whole area?  
Ken: Yes, well we had a trading standards officer come in here one day and asked to check our emerald rings. He pulled out a watchmakers eyeglass and looked at one and said, “Oh yes, that’s OK,” so I asked him to leave. An hour later the head of the Trading Standards came to see me to find out what had happened. I explained that with my training and qualifications that previous man could see nothing of meaning with what he was doing. So he asked me what they should have done to do a proper check. I know full well that looking through a microscope will tell you nothing unless you know what you are looking for so I explained what he needed to do with it to just maybe, if he’s qualified and trained enough, be able to verify it. Subsequently he came back and asked me if I would consider writing a paper for them on how they should approach jewellers and suggest the tools they could use and the limit that they can go to on a site visit. I later did a couple of days tuition for them all. Then when they got specialist problems, when is a diamond not a diamond, they would send them here and I would prepare expert reports on that, and it went on from there.   

RL: How did you get into all this?
Ken: I didn’t get into gemmology until my early forties. I was at a lecture where the lecturer had microscopes and was talking about emeralds and was saying you need to do this and you need to do that so see whether it is real or synthetic. We had just sold an emerald bracelet to a dealer, about twenty five years ago this was, for about five thousand pounds. And so I said we sold this and the chap just looked at it with his eyeglass and he could tell straight away what it was. So the lecturer invited me to have a look in a couple of microscopes. He points out things that I can’t actually see what he’s talking about. He showed me another one and I still can’t see it, and I thought, hold on, all these people I’ve dealt with over all these years  cannot know what they are doing.  Yes, he continued, we’ve developed these procedures because it’s quite important you know; there are many synthetics. We’re not talking about look for a green bit of glass, we’re looking for a synthetic emerald made in a laboratory to deceive. It’s meant to deceive because they are trying to grow it like a natural one so when you look at it you think that’s what it is, except it’s cost a few pounds in a laboratory. So I went off to University to start to learn.  I realised at that point that the majority of the trade don’t do this. I have here three volumes of photographs. These are internal patterns in stones which show you what can happen, showing natural production and artificial production of stones, and I have to sit down sometimes for hours with these. I used to go to something called Gem Club in London and we had a class there with experts and people from laboratories. I had a set of sapphires in a Victorian bracelet which logically I felt were natural because it was a genuine Victorian bangle and didn’t appear to have stones changed, so using all the wrong theories I thought they were natural, but I couldn’t find anything in them to say they were or they weren’t. After using the laboratory equipment after the class I still couldn’t find anything. So I asked the man who ran it all to have a look at it and six people looked at it for eight hours until finally another expert found something in one of the stones, but it took experts eight hours to come to a conclusion.  So when I spend a couple of hours reading through these volumes you realise all of a sudden that this is hard! And some of it is very, very hard, so coming back to the original story, when you have someone sitting there just with an eyeglass it is a non-starter. I found it at first quite humbling to realise how little is known.  


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As we continued to talk on with Ken we moved on to talking about Gemstones. Again, we hope this introduction will whet your appetite to find out more using your own web-browser & favourite search engine, Have fun.

Part 3: Introduction to GEMSTONES
(NB. In respect of stones, ‘carat’ refers to weight - One carat equals 200 milligrams or 0.200 grams)

RL: Have you examples of lax descriptions?
Ken: Oh yes, one of my favourite ones is you often see Alexandrite advertised in Internet or newspaper based shopping channels. Alexandrite is a very famous material named after Alexander the Russian prince-king and when it was found it was named in his honour and it is a stone that turns from a nice raspberry red to a green and it has this ability to change colour depending whether you are in candlelight or daylight or electric light.

RL: Like Opal you mean?
Ken: No, Opal doesn’t change colour; it has lots of different colours. Alexandrite physically changes colour. Whilst you are standing in my shop it might look a nice green colour and you walk out into the daylight and all of a sudden it’s become raspberry red and it’s to do with the way the stone handles light, and you see these very often sold on Internet shopping channels. The only problem is the material doesn’t change colour and Alexandrite is a very expensive material and a lot of the shopping channels advertise it as a colour-change material but when we come to buy it, it doesn’t seem to have a colour change.  We do have quite a lot of explaining to do to people sometimes when they have bought things off Internet shopping channels.  I actually use the proper mineral species which is Chrysoberyl. You can have something called Green Chrysoberyl which is basically Alexandrite that doesn’t change colour! There are lots of stones that are like this.